The Measure of Commitment

How you spend your days is how you spend your life

– slightly misquoted from Annie Dillard

How young I was, only seven, when I vowed to myself, 

'You will be a poet!' I already was, but I meant I would always

spend my life on poetry, even when I grew up. It would be my life.

'Your little poems,' my elders said, and trotted me out to recite them –

days not so much of glory as embarrassment. Then they put it to me:

'Is that what you want to be? But darling, you can't BE a poet like that.

How will you earn money? You will have to do it like a nice hobby.'

You perhaps did not know, dear parents, the word 'vocation'. Not

spend my life in poetry? Impossible! My jobs were my necessary hobbies.

'Your occupation?' I was asked. 'Poet,' I wrote, defiantly. Now, I don't even have to.

Life is, first, poetry: it's 'what I do’ – daily and lifelong, my glorious commitment.

Written in response to the prompt 'Commitment' from Poets United's Midweek Motif – in the form of a first word acrostic.